Daily Archives:October 26th, 2005

Apple goes into jewellery

iDo in white
For all you dedicated Apple fans who want all your accessories to match your veil, iPod and those white headphones on your wedding day, Apple has today announced the iDo wedding ring – the essential choice for any young person getting married in the coming months.

Also available in black, for those who like to Think Different, the iDo is carefully sculptured for maximum comfort.

iDo in black
“We’re seeing Apple styling becoming an important part of every aspect of people’s lives”, said an Apple spokesman. “Why should you give that up when you get married?”. All models can be engraved with a special message in Apple’s traditional Garamond font.

Apple has refused to confirm reports that, in an attempt to encourage more ‘switchers’ in the run up to Valentine’s Day, it will soon be introducing an entry-level engagement ring named the iWill.

Well, OK – I made all of that up. I’m actually just learning how to use the amazing Open Source 3D modelling package Blender. You can read about Blender’s history here. It’s quite an amazing package, especially since the Mac version of the application is only 12 MB! But nobody should expect to learn it overnight. If you thought Photoshop was complicated…


iWood if iCould but iCan’t

The iWood is a rather nice-looking wooden case for the iPod Nano.

REST in piece

Regular readers now know all about AJAX, Django and Rails, so it’s time to mention another piece of Internet jargon that’s doing the rounds at the moment, and that’s REST, which is short for REpresentational State Transfer. It’s a model of how the web works, how it was designed, and why we should try, where possible, to build web-based services in a manner that conforms to that basic design instead of going against its grain.

It originated in Roy Fielding’s PhD thesis, but unless you’re very keen, that’s not the easiest way to learn about it.

The best starting point might be Ryan Tomayko’s piece “How I explained REST to my wife“. If you want a little more technical detail after that, you might try this article and, of course, the entry in the ever-wonderful Wikipedia .

Text-by-voice

Now here’s something I didn’t know…

You can send a text message to a landline. Well, here in the UK, I can, at least; it may just be a service from my provider. But if I send an SMS to my home number, the system calls me up and reads it to me using quite a good synthesized voice. It costs the same as a regular text message. Quite useful if you’re travelling…

Maybe I’m a bit slow and everybody else knows this already. But thanks to Tom Robson for pointing it out!

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser